Electro-mechanical musical instrument tuners have been provided for acoustically coupling to musical instruments for sensing mechanical vibrations of the musical instruments to determine the pitch of tones being emitted by the musical instruments. The detected pitch is then used to provide an output indicating the pitch of the tone being played. These musical instrument tuners can be used both for tuning the musical instruments and for developing a player's ear for detecting the pitch being played, such as for teaching a person to recognize various intonations.
In the past, musical instrument tuners have been clamped directly to the instruments using C-type clamps to acoustically couple the tuners to the instruments, such that mechanical vibrations will pass to a vibratory motion detector mounted within the housing of the tuner. One type of C-type clamp is found in the Intellitouch™ PT1™ tuner offered by Onboard Research Corp. of Carrollton, Tex., which was the subject of U.S. Design Pat. No. D402,684. This tuner has two opposed, parallel, planar pads that are urged into contact with the instrument and then locked with clamping pressure sufficient to hold the tuner on the instrument. While this tuner has been an outstanding success, a limitation of this device is that the simple, planar clamping pads are not well-adapted for attachment to round surfaces, such as brass horn pipes, violin necks, etc. In addition, this tuner is difficult to attach to brass or woodwind bells, due to the curved shapes and reinforced bell rims. Other C-type clamps typically have a threaded clamping member which is subject to over tightening of the threaded coupling, which may cause damage to the musical instruments from excessive forces being applied to the instrument. In addition, alligator clips have also been used to clip musical instrument tuners to instruments, which may result in teeth of the alligator clips placing scratch marks on the exterior of the instruments.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,990,403 issued to Membreno, et al., is directed to a tuner that has a special adapter for fixing the tuner to an instrument lyre commonly used with wind instruments. This attachment technique, while exceptionally effective for those type of instruments, is not useful with other instruments lacking such a lyre.
Past tuners have also been limited in the directions from they may be viewed when attached to the few attachment locations available. The PT1™ tuner mentioned above has a simple one-axis pivoting connection between the tuner and the clamp, which is usable in most applications, but greater freedom of relative positioning between the clamp and the tuner would yield a greater number of satisfactory uses.
Thus a need presently exists for a tuner mount that permits an increased number of attachment locations and enhanced positionability with respect to the user once attached.